The Soothsayer’s Recompense, oil on canvas by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913; in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louise and Walter Arensberg CollectionAfter studying art in Athens and Florence, de Chirico moved to Germany in 1906 and entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His early style was influenced by Arnold Böcklin’s and Max Klinger’s paintings, which juxtapose the fantastic with the commonplace. By 1910 de Chirico was living in Florence, where he began painting a unique series of landscapes that included The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910), in which the long, sinister, and illogical shadows cast by unseen objects onto empty city spaces contrast starkly with bright, clear light that is rendered in brooding green tonalities. Moving to Paris in 1911, de Chirico gained the admiration of Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire with his ambiguously ominous scenes of deserted piazzas. In these works, such as The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) and The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914), classical statues, dark arcades, and small, isolated figures are overpowered by their own shadows and by severe, oppressive architecture.

Giorgio de Chirico, 1955.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.In 1915 de Chirico was conscripted into the Italian army and stationed at Ferrara, Italy. There, he was able to continue making art and practiced a modification of his earlier manner, marked by more compact groupings of incongruous objects. Diagnosed with a nervous condition, he was admitted into a military hospital, where he met Carlo Carrà in 1917; together the two artists developed the style they named Metaphysical painting. In de Chirico’s paintings of this period, such as the Grand Metaphysical Interior (1917) and The Seer (1915), the colours are brighter, and dressmakers’ mannequins, compasses, biscuits, and paintings on easels assume a mysterious significance within enigmatic landscapes or interiors.

The element of mystery in de Chirico’s paintings dwindled after 1919, when he became interested in the technical methods of the Italian classical tradition. He eventually began painting in a more realistic and academic style, and by the 1930s he had broken with his avant-garde colleagues and disclaimed his earlier works. De Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings exercised a profound influence on the painters of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s.